Black and White/Grayscale problem

[dustball64]

Alright, first off, this problem may be long and confusing, but it is annoying the hell out of me, so I would love to just get any type of response (hopefully one that fixes the problem).

This morning, I turned on my computer and went downstairs to watch some TV. When I came back up, the computer was in sleep mode, like normal. When I started it back up, all of the sudden everything was in gray scale (basically black and white with shades of gray). The first thing that went through my mind was that something screwed up with the colors, so I immediately went to my control panel, and appearance and personalization. From that, I have re-calibrated the colors, tried adjusting colors both in my nVidia graphic control panel and with the windows control panel, and attempted to change the quality of colors. None of this worked, and it stayed in gray scale.

Ok, I thought, that was weird. So I tried restarting my computer. When it started back up, it was in color.. for five seconds. Then it reverted back to gray scale. So I shut down my computer, left it off for ten seconds, and restarted it. The same thing happened. So, I shut it down, unplugged everything, and restarted it, and I still got the five second color to gray scale conversion.

I then thought it was my monitor. I have a laptop hooked up to a bigger monitor, so I unplugged my big monitor from my smaller laptop screen, but the gray was on the laptop as well. This means the monitor was not the problem.

Then I thought it was a virus.. so I ran a virus scan, but it did not find anything, and I had not recently downloaded or ran anything.

From there, I attempted to do a system restore, but once it "restored," and the computer came back on, it was back to gray scale. I tried every single check point I had on that list, and every time I got a message saying the system restore failed.

This is also very weird. I took a screen shot of my desktop in an attempt to show what I saw, where everything, including my video games, were in gray scale. When I posted it, I got a bunch of crap because no one believed me. My friend actually told me that the screen shot I took was in perfect and normal color. So when someone else views my computer or a screen shot, I guess they don't see the gray that I do.

I am up to date on all of my drivers.. and I have never had a problem with this computer.

Here are some specs

-Vista 32bit

-Intel Dual Core 2.55GHz

-nVidia Geforce GT240M 1GB

-4GB DDR3 RAM

-Made by ASUS

I hope that's enough.. and I REALLY need your help.

Thanks.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Welcome to the Windows Forum.

Can you post the screenshot here?

[-pops-]

A failed graphics/video card is my first thought.

Does the card have a fan? If yes is that fan working? There is a possibility that the card is overheating thus: starts up OK, overheats after five seconds and shuts down the colour circuitry

[Corey Gagnon]

I just started having the same issue with my Acer laptop. The screen on the laptop is in grayscale. However, when I plug in an external monitor, I have colour. Its really annoying. I am pretty sure the display is fine because I have colour in the Bios screen as well as the Windows boot up screen. Sometimes the colour stays after a reboot, but most times it switches to grayscale after a few seconds.

Any help would be appreciated.

Oh.. and yes my graphics card has a fan and it is working.

[-pops-]

Intermittent faults are always the ones most difficult to diagnose and deal with. Often they are due to a loose connection which corrects itself (or the opposite) after a "warm-up" period.

As a starter, can I suggest that you open the case of the machine (assuming you are familiar with doing that) and ensure that all items are fully plugged into their appropriate sockets/housings.

[Corey Gagnon]

Found the answer on another forum. Here it is for anyone else having this problem.

Under the NVIDIA Control Panel, go to 'Display', 'Adjust Desktop Color Settings', under the 3rd setting, 'Apply the following enhancements', there's a slider for 'Digital Vibrance'. Somehow, it was set to '0'. All that was needed was to set it to 50% and everything was back to normal.

Cheers,